National Geographic Society

Aristotle was wrong—just ask Galileo's ghost.

The 17th-century Italian was on hand today to witness the official opening of the National Air and Space Museum's Public Observatory, a new 22-foot (6.7-meter) dome housing a more than 40-year-old telescope.

"Galileo" and David DeVorkin stargaze in front of the observatory's dome.
—Photograph by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

The 16-inch (40-centimeter) Boller and Chivens telescope is an artifact on loan from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, once a feature of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., but now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The telescope had been purchased in 1966 and used for research at Harvard's Oak Ridge Observatory, about 30 to 40 miles (48 to 64 kilometers) from Cambridge.

When Oak Ridge closed in 2005, the museum's senior space historian, David DeVorkin, had an idea: Bring the historic telescope to the Mall, but don't put it in a display case. Instead, make it available for public use.

Starting today, museum visitors can head over to the East Terrace Tuesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and see like an astronomer. And yes, it is entirely possible to closely examine the sun (with special filters), the moon, and several of the brighter stars, planets, and nebulae during broad daylight.

—Photograph by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

Like a Mauna Kea dome in miniature, the new facility has a rotating top and a sliding door in the ceiling to protect the telescope from the elements. FYI, if you're there on a cloudy or rainy day, you won't be able to use the observatory.

Overall, the project makes for a nice complement to the museum's collections, since it should help the museum's seven million annual visitors gain first-hand understandings of the science presented inside the building, noted museum director General John R. "Jack" Dailey.

"The observatory will enable us to share our mission in an interactive way," Dailey told reporters at this morning's unveiling ceremony.

And Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, called the telescope a "key element" in the museum's education mission, "since it is so physical, so dramatic."

Speaking of drama, one of the highlights of the ceremony was DeVorkin's speech, which was interrupted by an unnamed actor portraying Galileo.

In a re-enactment of many an astronomer's dream interview, DeVorkin plied Galileo for information about his famous first glimpses of the heavens 400 years ago and how he came to his now celebrated conclusions about what revolves around what.

Contrary to the then-beloved teachings of Greek philosopher Aristotle, "the heavens are not perfect," Galileo told the crowd. Just look at the orb of the moon. Its seemingly smooth face is actually littered with valleys and mountains [really impact craters, later astronomers figured out].

The moon's pockmarked surface is clearly visible in a picture taken August 3 with a Meade Lunar and Planetary Imager mounted on the Public Observatory's telescope.
—Photograph courtesy Smithsonian Public Observatory Project

"And have you looked at the little ears on Saturn?" Galileo asked. Or at Jupiter, which has four distinct spheres in its orbit? If something is rotating around Jupiter, that means not all things in the heavens revolve around Earth!

Galileo published some of these initial findings in 1610 in Sidereus Nuncius, the first scientific "paper" based on telescopic astronomy.

A first edition of this publication is also on display for the next three months at Air and Space, safely ensconced inside the museum's "Explore the Universe" gallery.

In the world of science journalism, we writers and editors often walk along the edge of a very sharp sword.

On one side lies the realm of Pure Accuracy, filled with semantics and pedantry and enough qualifiers to turn the discovery of giant squid fossils on Mars into a 40-page report on "the theoretical life-cycle and behavioral dynamics of a novel Architeuthis species as revealed by spectroscopic analysis of Noachian coprolites in the Syrtis Major quadrangle."

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

But on the other side of the sword's edge lies Pandering Sensationalism, where almost every headline seems to end with an exclamation point [Missing Link Found!] and every discovery is hopelessly lacking in context.

Scientists rail about being misrepresented, misquoted, and full of misgivings when it comes to working with the press. Journos counter that if they don't make science palatable for the average American, science coverage in general will promptly disappear in a puff of logic.

It's a tough job finding the middle ground, for writers and for researchers.

For me, one of the hardest things to grapple with is the media's perpetuation of popular myths.

Gentle metaphors may not always be 100% accurate, but they serve a purpose. Solar wind, for example, is not *technically* wind, but it's a great, media-friendly name for the stream of ionized particles constantly emanating from the sun.

Some lay-language fallbacks, meanwhile, are totally wrong, totally unnecessary, and need to stop. Now.

Say it with me, now: Black holes DO NOT suck.

—Illustration of a star getting too close to a supermassive black hole courtesy NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Via Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: suck
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -ed/-ing/-s
Etymology: Middle English soken, souken, from Old English sumacrcan; akin to Old High German sumacrgan to suck, Old Norse sumacrga, Latin sugere to suck, Middle Breton sunaff juice, Greek hyei it is raining, Lithuanian sunkti to filter, ooze, Tocharian B swese rain transitive verb
1 a (1) : to draw (a liquid) into the mouth by a partial vacuum caused by motion of the mouth ...

A vacuum is a total absence of matter, even molecules of air. By creating a partial vacuum, someone sucking through a straw makes the liquid move toward them because, that's right, Nature abhors a vacuum and will want to fill the absence with whatever's close at hand.

By contrast, a black hole is what's left of a very massive star that went supernova. The darn thing is so dense that it exerts a gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape.

Objects near the lip of the black hole, known as the event horizon, can be said to be getting pulled in or—since this is gravity we're talking about—to be falling in to the black hole.

They are NOT being sucked in. Different effect entirely.

Even more exciting and just as poorly understood, matter needs to be in just the right place near a black hole for it to be affected. Galaxy Girl has a great explanation for why, if the sun suddenly became a black hole, Earth would not get pulled in.

And now we know that it definitely wouldn't get sucked in.

It's kind of like a wool sweater that's been put through the dryer. Except the sweater is a hurricane-like storm as wide as three Earths, and the dryer is Jovian climate change.

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

From 1996 to 2006, Jupiter's Great Red Spot shrank by about 15 percent, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who measured the size of the storm based on wind speed and direction.

"We don't fully understand all the sources of energy, or the ways the Red Spot loses energy," study co-author Xylar Asay-Davis told Space.com.

"But these can become slightly imbalanced for a period of time, and this is likely to be what is causing the Red Spot to shrink—less energy is being fed in and more is slowly dissipating away."

Asay-Davis and colleagues think ongoing climate change on Jupiter may be at the root of the energy imbalance.

These changes became especially noticeable between 2005 and 2007, when Jupiter went through a major atmospheric tantrum—the Impressionist cloud cover changed hues and several white oval storms suddenly morphed into brick-red mini versions of the iconic spot.

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL

Scientists suggest this upheaval was the result of the south pole cooling down while the equator heated up. Jupiter may have compensated for the changes by forming new storms to help spread around the heat, the team said.

The UC Berkeley researchers are quick to note that the Great Red Spot, which has been raging for at least 340 years, is still a relatively stable storm that continues to crank out winds of up to 300 miles (480 kilometers) an hour.

"We find that the Red Spot has been shrinking but not slowing down," Asay-Davis told SPACE.com.

But NASA researcher Glenn Orton, who wasn't involved in the paper, says it's possible the huge spot may one day disappear.

"It's just a storm that, like many things, has a natural growth and disintegration rate," Orton told CNN.

Asay-Davis and colleagues presented their work last November at a meeting of the American Physical Society, and it was recently submitted for publication in Icarus, the International Journal of Solar System Studies.

[Christine's dad, this one's for you.]